seems it's immoral and there's a to-do, and financially it
may prove a heavy disappointment. The plaintive request sent
to me, to make the young folks married properly before 'that
night,' I refused; you will see what would be left of the
yarn, had I consented. This is a poison bad world for the
romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by
not having any women in it at all; but when I remember I had
the TREASURE OF FRANCHARD refused as unfit for a family
magazine, I feel despair weigh upon my wrists.

As I know you are always interested in novels, I must tell
you that a new one is now entirely planned. It is to be
called SOPHIA SCARLET, and is in two parts. Part I. The
Vanilla Planter. Part II. The Overseers. No chapters, I
think; just two dense blocks of narrative, the first of which
is purely sentimental, but the second has some rows and
quarrels, and winds up with an explosion, if you please! I
am just burning to get at Sophia, but I MUST do this Samoan
journalism - that's a cursed duty. The first part of Sophia,
bar the first twenty or thirty pages, writes itself; the
second is more difficult, involving a good many characters -
about ten, I think - who have to be kept all moving, and give
the effect of a society. I have three women to handle, out
and well-away! but only Sophia is in full tone. Sophia and
two men, Windermere, the Vanilla Planter, who dies at the end
of Part I., and Rainsforth, who only appears in the beginning
of Part II. The fact is, I blush to own it, but Sophia is a
REGULAR NOVEL; heroine and hero, and false accusation, and
love, and marriage, and all the rest of it - all planted in a
big South Sea plantation run by ex-English officers - A LA